Arguing
about the War
The Top Ten Reasons for Staying in (Leaving) Iraq
By Michael Schwartz
Tom Dispatch

Sunday 04 December 2005

I
often receive emails - pro and con - about my postings on the war in Iraq, and I try to respond to any
substantive questions or critiques offered. But when I received an email
recently entitled "10 Questions" in response to a Tomdispatch
commentary detailing the arguments for immediate withdrawal, I must admit my
heart sank - the questions were familiar, but the answers were complex and I
was in no mood to spend the time needed to respond properly.

After
a couple of days, however, I began to warm to the idea of writing short but
pointed responses to these common criticisms of antiwar positions because, I
realized, they are the bread and butter of daily Iraq discourse in our country.
When the war comes up in the media or in casual conversation, these are the
issues that are raised by those who think we have to "stay the
course" - and among those who oppose the war, these are the lurking,
unspoken questions that haunt our discussions. So here are my best brief
answers to these key issues in the crucial, ongoing debate over Iraq.

"I
read your article on withdrawal of American troops," my correspondent
began, "and questioned the lack of discussion of the following…" (His
comments are in bold.)

1.
Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections, water and energy,
schools). No
Saddam to fear! Water and energy delivery as well as schools are worse off than
before the U.S. invasion. Ditto for the state of
hospitals (and medical supplies), highways, and oil production. Elections are a
positive change, but the elected government does not have more than a semblance
of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make
real choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish
political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was
that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American
withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise
(apparently under pressure from the US).
They have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign
promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that
reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shia) are
becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shia Iraqis now are
about 70% in favor of U.S. withdrawal.

2.
Nothing was mentioned about Iraqis who want the U.S. to remain (especially the Kurds
and the majority of Iraqi women). Among the three principle ethno-religious groups in Iraq, the Sunnis (about a fifth of the
population) are almost unanimous in their opposition to the American presence,
while around 70% of the Shia (themselves about 60% of the population) want the U.S. to withdraw. Hence, even before
we consider the Kurds, the majority of Iraqis are in favor of a full-scale
American departure "as soon as possible." It is true that the Kurds
(about 20% of the population) favor the U.S. remaining. However, they have their own militias and many of them do
not want significant numbers of American troops in their territory. (The U.S. presence there is small-scale at
the moment.) What they desire is a U.S. occupation for someone else, not themselves. I think we can safely
say that the vast majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of U.S. troops.

I
know of no study indicating that Iraqi women favor the U.S. presence. Perhaps you are
referring to the fact that large numbers of women in Iraq are upset and angry over the
erosion of their rights since the fall of Saddam. I know some commentators
claim that the U.S. presence is insurance against further erosion of those rights,
but everything I have read indicates that a significant number of Iraqi women
(like all Iraqis) blame the Bush administration for these policies. After all,
the Americans installed in power (and continue to support) the political forces
spearheading anti-woman policies in the country. Polling data do not indicate
that any sizable group of Sunni or Shia women support a continued U.S. presence.

3.
Nothing was mentioned about the benefits of the U.S. military gaining valuable
experience and knowledge daily. Certainly, the U.S. gains military and political "experience" from the war, as
from any war, but at the expense of many deaths (2,127) and injuries (at least
15,704) to American soldiers. Beyond these publicly listed casualty figures lie
the endless ways in which the lives of our soldiers are permanently damaged: On
November 26, for example, the New York Times reported on a recent army study
indicating that 17% of all personnel sent to Iraq have "serious symptoms
of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder." Since about a
million American troops have now seen service in Iraq, approximately 170,000 have gained the
"experience" of having a severe mental problem. Moreover, the war
experience in Iraq has proved so demoralizing to the
military that many of the best soldiers are leaving at the end of their tours,
instead of staying on in active or reserve status. This is undermining the
viability of the military, long term.

U.S. casualties, of course, have been
dwarfed by the damage done to the Iraqi people. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Iraqi
civilians are dying each year - and multitudes are injured. We are wrecking the
country's infrastructure.

Certainly
there is a better way to gain experience than this.

4.
Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of a strong democracy in the Middle East. We can all agree that a strong
democracy in the Middle
East would have huge
benefits for Iraq and for its neighbors as well as
for the rest of the world. If I thought that our actions there were actually
helping to bring this about, perhaps I might also believe that the benefits of
an active democracy outweighed at least some of the many problems we have been
creating. But from the beginning, the talk of democracy was a hollow mantra,
just one of a group of public rationalizations for a war motivated by the Bush
administration's desire to dominate Middle Eastern politics and economics. The U.S. government has never actually
relinquished sovereignty to the Iraqi government.

5.
Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of oil reserves. Though the
Bush Administration denies it, many observers agree with you that access to
Iraqi oil was a major motivation for the war. But we need to understand the
nature of this motivation. Even before the invasion, when UN sanctions were
still in place against Saddam Hussein's regime, American oil companies could
(and, in many cases, did) buy Iraqi oil at market price. The issue was never
"access" to Iraqi oil in the sense of simply being able to buy it.
The Bush administration was thinking about other kinds of energy access,
including controlling the heartland of the word's main future oil supplies and
giving American oil companies privileged access to Iraqi oil reserves. (See,
for example, the recent report by the Global Policy Forum). It's my contention
that such privileged "access" for U.S. oil companies would not actually help the American people. The oil
majors, after all, have a long history of exploiting Americans hardly less
ruthlessly than they exploit the peoples of other countries, when they can make
a larger profit by doing so. (The latest incident in their long and deplorable
record involved the massive price increases they instituted at American pumps
almost immediately after hurricane Katrina hit.) Moreover, such privileged
access would have deprived the Iraqis of their right to use the oil to their
own benefit - something they desperately need now that the Saddam Hussein
regime, twelve years of brutal sanctions, and the current war have gutted the
country.

The
best approach for us (but not necessarily for the American oil companies) would
be to buy our oil on the open market, put our research money into conservation
and renewable fuels instead of military adventures, and avoid trying to get
"control" of something that doesn't belong to us.

6.
Nothing was mentioned about what fundamentalist Muslims would like to achieve.
I assume that, when you refer to "fundamentalist Muslims," you are
referring to terrorists, including those in Iraq and those who attacked the WorldTradeCenter, the London
tube, and the Madrid trains. First, I have to disagree
with this identification of the terrorists (who are indeed fundamentalist) with
all fundamentalist Muslims. That would be the same as characterizing those who
bombed the Oklahoma
CityFederalBuilding as "fundamentalist Christians" and then
implying that the destruction of such buildings is what all fundamentalist
Christians yearn to achieve.

Second,
I disagree with the implicit argument that somehow withdrawal will allow the
terrorists to dominate Iraqi society and impose a horrible regime on an Iraq, bent on attacking its neighbors
and the United States. A large part of my commentary in
favor of withdrawal was devoted to debunking this prevalent idea. I think I
made a reasonably good case for the possibility that Bush administration
actions in Iraq are creating and strengthening
the terrorist groups within the Iraqi resistance. The longer the U.S. stays, the more the Islamic
terrorists there are likely gain strength; the sooner the U.S. leaves, the more quickly the
resistance will subside, and - with it - support for terrorism. The
administration's Iraqi occupation policies are the equivalent of a nightmarish
self-fulfilling prophesy.

7.
Nothing was mentioned about the results of the U.S. evacuation from Southeast Asia (over a million killed within 5
years). I think
we need to disentangle two different events involving the (forced) American
departure from Southeast
Asia. First, there
was Vietnam, where it was always predicted that a horrendous bloodbath would
follow any American withdrawal. Indeed, there were certainly deaths there after
the U.S. left, and many refugees fled the country, some for the United States.
But whatever these figures may have been, they were dwarfed by the incredible
bloodbath that the U.S. created by being in Vietnam in the first place.
Reputable sources suggest that millions of Vietnamese died (and countless
others were permanently wounded) during the war years. We must conclude,
therefore, that in Vietnam our departure actually resulted in a drastic decline
in the levels of violence, and - sometime afterward - an end to the havoc and
destruction; not to speak of the fact that, for years now, the United States
has had plenty of "credibility" in Vietnam.

Second,
there was the holocaust in Cambodia, which may well have resulted in a million
or more deaths. This was also, however, a complex consequence of the U.S.
presence in Southeast Asia, not a result of our departure. Cambodia had a
stable, neutral government until the Nixon administration launched massive
secret bombings against its territory, invaded the country, destabilized the
regime, and set in motion the grim unraveling that led to the rise of murderous
Khmer Rouge. If the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965 or 1968, that
holocaust would quite certainly never have happened.

The
situation in Iraq is not that dissimilar. If the U.S. withdraws soon, there is
at least a reasonable chance that the violence will subside quickly and that
peace and stability in the region might ever so slowly take hold. The longer
the U.S. stays - further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing
neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) - the more likely it is that horrific
civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur.

8.
Nothing was mentioned about the reputation of the U.S. if it retreats.
Don't forget the quotes about Somalia from Osama Bin Laden. "Cut and
Run." Here we agree. If the U.S. withdraws, this "retreat" will
undermine U.S. credibility whenever, in the future, an administration threatens
to use military power to force another country to submit to its demands (and
may also, as after Vietnam, make Americans far more wary about sending troops abroad
to fight presidential wars of choice). I think there are two important
implications that derive from this observation.

The
first is that this has, in fact, already happened. The most crystalline case
making this point is that of Iran, whose leaders were much more compliant to
U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than now that they have seen how the
Iraqi resistance has frustrated our military. (In fact, the invasion of Iraq
has probably done more to strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime, domestically
and in the Middle East, than any set of events in the past quarter-century.
(See my recent article on this at Tomdispatch.) In other words - from your
point of view - the longer the Bush administration stays and flounders, the
more it undermines its ability to use the threat of military intervention to
force other countries to conform to its demands.

From
my point of view - and this is the second implication I want to point out - the
undermining of U.S. credibility is one of the few good things that has resulted
from the war in Iraq. I do not believe that anything positive is likely to come
from American military adventures; quite the contrary, the Bush administration
(and the Clinton , earlier Bush, and Reagan administrations) have used military
power to impose bad policies on other countries. We would be much better off, I
believe, with the multi-polar world that many Americans advocate (and this
administration loathes the very thought of), in which no single state
(including the U.S.) could impose itself on others without at least the support
of a great many others. We would be far better off in a multitude of ways if
our country stopped spending more on its military than the rest of the world
combined and started spending some of that money on things that would actually
improve the welfare of our people.

9.
Nothing was mentioned about Germany, Japan, Korea, and the former Yugoslavia.
Should we get out of those? Where was the pre-war planning to get out of all
those locations. Did Lincoln have a pre-war plan to leave the South? I agree
that some wars, some interventions, and some occupations can be positive things
(without evaluating the particulars of the examples you offer). That does not
mean that all, or even most, of them are good. The invasion, occupation, and
destruction of Iraq is neither justified, nor moral.

10.
Nothing was mentioned about 9/11, where we were attacked by fundamentalist
Muslims. How do we change their attitudes? This query rests on two
premises: The first belongs to the Bush administration and was part of the
package of lies and intelligence manipulations that it used to hustle Congress
and the American people into war - the claim that Saddam Hussein's regime and
the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 had
anything in common or any ties whatsoever. They didn't and the truth is that
9/11, important as it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no
place in any discussion of the war there - or at least that was certainly true
until George Bush and his advisors managed almost single-handedly to recreate
Iraq as the "central theater in the war on terror."

The
second premise is one held by many Americans - that the only way to change the
attitudes of those who are fighting the U.S. involves "whipping their
ass," which rests on another commonly held opinion - that "these
people only understand force." Attitudes are never changed in this way.
Every serious scholar who studies terrorism agrees on this essential point:
Terrorism arises from the misery that many people are forced to live in or in
close proximity to. It is misguided and criminal, but it nevertheless derives
from complaints people have about their daily lives, about the humiliations
they experience in the larger social and political worlds they inhabit, and
about the apparent impossibility of changing these circumstances.

The
best way to transform such attitudes, built as they are on hopelessness, would
be to take a fraction (a fraction!!) of the money we are now spending on the
war in Iraq and on our military and invest it in the lives of others. One
example: a panel of expert development economists just delivered a report to
the UN saying that for $50 billion annually we could bring the income of the
poorest people in the world up to a level that would largely eradicate the
famines and mass starvation currently spreading from one continent to another.
That project, if enacted, would do more to reduce terrorism than all the
"anti-terrorist" activities of our government, including the entire
official defense budget (about $400 billion a year), the $200 billion for the
war in Iraq, and the $80 or so billion for the Department of Homeland Security.
Put another way, if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it could fund an entire program
to alleviate global suffering with but a modest portion of the money it saved,
and start to reduce terrorism instead of increasing it.

--------

Michael
Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate
College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on
popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government
dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous internet
sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times ,MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in
print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical
Politics and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.